When Your Father Is An Elected Official

It’s a huge election year. Candidates in local, state, and national races are freaking out. There’s a lot on the line. Voters are angrier and crazier than ever. But you know who I can’t stop thinking about?

The children of all those candidates—all those poor, innocent children who are suffering through filming commercials, shooting family portraits for glossy mailers, and being dragged to fundraisers.

My siblings and I grew up the children of an elected official. When I was four, my dad was 34 years old and sworn in as a judge. He was actually sworn in on the day of my birthday party and mentioned in his speech he had to cut it short because his daughter wanted to go to her party (I would later spend my 15th birthday passing out campaign brochures door-to-door with my friends). As a kid, I didn’t know what his job was. When people asked me I told them, “He bangs a hammer and puts up signs in people’s yards.” What he was actually doing was making life-changing decisions in a court of law and dealing with rapists, murderers, and at least one man who had psychological problems and wouldn’t stop swallowing silverware and rosaries inside the jail.

The courthouse became an oddly comfortable place to visit. On the few occasions we visited during working hours and were allowed to sit in the back of the courtroom to watch our dad in action, I could never figure out how the man who laughed at Looney Toons was the same serious person sitting on the bench. The stern voice he used I had only heard maybe once in my life, and that was when I hit a wiffle ball into his face from close range.

One of my favorite perks of growing up the child of a judge was when our dad would give us free rein in his courtroom on weekends while he caught up on paperwork in his chambers. My siblings and I would play “The Courtroom Game,” in which we took turns being judge, jury, witness, lawyer person, person pointing a stick at a giant paper pad on easel, and court reporter. At least once, the game involved pushing the emergency button under the bench that we thought rang a secret doorbell or told someone you needed coffee but learned the hard way it really calls the deputies to run upstairs and make sure nobody shot you (in which case you will need to lie to both the deputies and your father that you did not push any buttons, you did not see any buttons, somebody else must have pushed a button). The best time was when our dad came in to check on us, and we made him play the witness, but he leaned too far back in his chair, flipped over backward, and hit his head on the wall, knocking over the easel on top of him. He lay there stunned for a few seconds and told us not to tell our mom. Then we went to touch people’s computer keyboards, and I would write horrible curse words and then my full legal name and return home that night scared I was going to get arrested for being 10 years old and writing “sh*t” and “butthole” on a government work computer.

As for photo shoots and commercials, the memories my sister and I have vary. We once shot a commercial at my grandparents’ house that required us to act like we were in a rush getting ready for a school day. I had recently read The Catcher in the Rye, and my adolescent brain was caught up in labeling everything and everyone phony. In one scene, we were all sitting around a breakfast table pretending to eat while our mom poured us juice. I had reached maximum phony capacity and began making comments like, “We don’t do this! We’ve never done this! This isn’t even our house!” I was outraged about how it was all fake, that we never ate breakfast together on school days, and how I had never seen our mom smiling and pouring us all juice like a servant (God bless the poor people filming us).

My sister viewed it all from a different angle, remembering, “My role in the commercial was reduced after every take until it was me pretending to be late, and I wasn’t even allowed to look at the camera. I thought it was going to be my big break.” (Clearly, she would be an EGOT by now if it weren’t for the director.) Her memories of two photo shoots many years apart were of accidentally shutting our little brother’s hand in the courtroom’s 900-pound chamber door and hating her outfit that made her feel like she was “never going to get famous from these photos!”

I will say that with all the fundraisers and events we attended we got in a lot of good practice to develop firm handshakes. We learned how to carry ourselves at adult functions and make conversation with people who were not our peers. We also ran off as soon as we were given the green light to play with other bored, disgruntled children of elected officials at these events, each of us adorned in assorted campaign paraphernalia for our respective parents. Once you took the requisite photos and clapped after your parent’s public speech, you were free to eat from buffet tables or roll down grassy hills and engage in other activities that left you disheveled until someone’s mom or a campaign manager ultimately came around to put the kibosh on the hi-jinx.

Not everything was fun and games, though. My dad once held a judicial job in the capital that required my parents flying around the whole state to campaign. Their absence was not something we were used to, and when we didn’t stay with our grandparents, they hired weird old ladies from a sitter service we weren’t thrilled about. My mom once fell off a dais during a fundraiser, which is funny as hell to think about because we weren’t there to see it, but in reality I’m sure was embarrassing and extremely painful. I suppose it did end up a real bonus to us kids, though, because it gave her a creaky knee so she couldn’t sneak upstairs at home to bust us doing something bad.

Once, when I was in middle school, my siblings and I were waiting in our car in the driveway while our parents were inside. We watched as a car of burglars pulled up and a man entered our garage, exited with our leaf blower, and then fled in the car. Since I watched it unfold and took down the license plate, I had to relay all this to an officer. The next day, my science teacher told me he read about my “heroism” in the morning paper. I read the article about this piddly incident and was embarrassed at the embellishment of the journalist who obviously had nothing else to write about. I was also scared forever after. I thought, Jeez, if the paper wrote about that, I hope I never get into trouble or it’ll end up in the paper, make Mom and Dad look bad, and everyone will think I’m terrible! I asked my younger siblings if they, too, felt this pressure for perfection. My brother said, “I definitely behaved well so it wouldn’t reflect poorly on Dad.” My sister said, “Maybe I used it as an excuse in high school for things I didn’t feel comfortable doing, like, ‘I have to be careful toilet papering that house because if I get caught it could be in the papers and my dad could lose his job,’ and my friends called B.S. I also grew up saying things like, ‘Politics are in my blood.’ How did I have any friends?”

Committing yourself to a job you have to campaign for to keep sounds absolutely terrible to me. Thankfully, there are folks so dedicated to the privilege of public service that having to go through the election process does not deter them. I’m proud of my dad and the work he did over several decades, and I know campaigning was one of his least favorite things to do, but as a child I didn’t understand or fully appreciate just how much work that entailed. The job of an elected official was evaluated through my own personal lens, and I found it alternately annoying, mortifying, exhilarating, and overwhelming.

When I see a candidate’s family photo in a brochure or their family standing behind him or her on TV, I think about the behind-the-scenes effort it took to get the kids to cooperate, smile, and appear moderately interested, and I wonder what the kids are thinking and feeling in that moment.

Are they bored? Do they feel powerful by association? Are they angry they had to miss an awesome birthday party at the go-kart track? Did they swear vengeance against their mom for the matching outfits she made them and their siblings wear? Do they want to crawl into a hole and disappear? Are they secretly praying nobody found out they ate 12 tamales from the Delicious Tamales canister behind the booth their parents were working at the Aggie Park fundraiser?

It’s all too easy to view candidates merely as the caricatures the media reduces them to and forget they are regular people who just have a less-than-regular method to obtain and retain their jobs. I try to think about their family life to normalize them and flesh them out a bit more. When I hear snarky jokes about a candidate’s appearance or wishing them dead a thousand ways, I cringe and picture the candidate’s kids overhearing those things and am reminded how puerile and unnecessary that kind of commentary is. To me, refocusing energy into evaluating candidates based on logic and an understanding of their policies and positions on various issues seems a better use of time than crafting a forgettable meme that gets you seven likes on Facebook.

When I was little, I was vaguely aware of public opinion if certain mouthy kids came up to me and repeated something they overheard their parents say (that’s how I learned what a “hit list” was in fourth grade) or if my mom was griping about an editorial or rolling her eyes at a dumb local gossip column mention. (My dad was once critiqued for wearing purple ties when I guess only red or blue were acceptable. Another time, the paper reported he stopped running a marathon to take a break and have a beer in a taqueria, and if you think a German, Mexican, and Irish guy is not going to take a break for a taco and beer on the weekend, race or not, you’re crazy. But for real, what a waste of valuable print space.)

Now that I’m an adult, I’ve compiled and reviewed decades of his articles and clippings. There’s a lot of really supportive, complimentary stuff in there, but some of the less flattering ones have gotten me a little riled up. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be for the spouse or child or an elected official to avoid all the negative commentary today, especially with a candidate on the national stage and especially with social media and the vicious style of snark that people unfortunately find so entertaining now. I guess there’s a momentary high of making a joke or stinging comment and feeling a surge of power for a millisecond—I’m totally guilty of laughing at cheap shots—but overall it’s just wasteful, negative energy. Sure, there will always be candidates you personally won’t relate to for any number of reasons, but my advice is to not waste time crafting puerile memes for Facebook, going down the social media rabbit hole of intentionally anger-inciting articles and blog posts, and getting yourself all riled up. No matter how you feel about them, a majority of candidates (OK, perhaps not presidential candidates) are just regular people at the bottom of it all. They’re dealing with a busted pipe flooding the kitchen, their kids getting bullied and failing tests, pets puking on their beds, cars breaking down, etc. For what it’s worth, I implore you to keep all these things in mind when you’ve reached media saturation and realize you’ve started to view candidates as cartoon versions of themselves. It may be semi-amusing, but keep in mind that meme you’re sharing is someone’s mom or dad.